


In a Strange Land

by Jayne L (JayneL)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-02
Updated: 2012-10-02
Packaged: 2017-11-15 11:43:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/526938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayneL/pseuds/Jayne%20L
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything is different here. Everything is wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In a Strange Land

**Author's Note:**

> Explicit spoilers through 7.23; some pre-season-publicity-tease character and situation spoilers for season 8.

Castiel got cold in Purgatory. He got dirty. He got disoriented, faltering sometimes between one step and the next. He winced at rustling in the underbrush, and flinched away from breezes.

He got sick, staggering suddenly away from Dean and falling to his hands and knees, body heaving as he vomited into the grass.

The first time that happened, Dean jolted himself out of his shock and, after glancing warily off their path to make sure it wasn't a precursor to some new attack--there was all kinds of fucked up shit here, and not everything tried to kill you from the outside--crouched beside Cas and put his hand on his shaking back. "Cas? What's wrong with you?"

Castiel coughed, wracked with tremors, breathing hard and forced-slow. "How do you see this place, Dean?" His voice was thick in his throat, his head bowed, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. "What does it look like? How does it feel?"

Dean glanced up again, confused and alert, looking for something different than the ferns and trees and sloping, rocky ground that had been their scenery for the last two weeks. "It's a forest, Cas. It feels like a forest." A shaggy, dangerous forest that pricked constantly at every one of his hunter's instincts, but--a forest. Beneath his hand, Cas shuddered. "Why? How's it look to you?"

Castiel raised his head and opened his eyes and fixed Dean with a look like a growl. " _Wrong._ "

* * *

Sam has an apartment. Sam has a day job. Sam isn't hunting anymore.

The night Dean gets back, he sits on Sam's couch in the dark and listens to cars passing on the street outside, the hum of Sam's refrigerator across the room, Sam breathing softly in the bedroom, Sam's neighbours' footsteps through the ceiling. He keeps his eyes open and his hand on his machete and listens for the sudden, heavy silence that means something clawed and vicious is about to leap from the shadows and try to tear him to shreds.

In the morning, he slides the machete under a cushion before Sam comes out of the bedroom.

* * *

Castiel stood uneasily on the pebbled bank of a broad, slow-rushing stream. He refused to dip his hands in to wash, even as Dean eagerly sluiced off the worst of his own most recent layer of gore and sweat and grime. When Dean scooped up a handful to drink, his lips pressed thinly together.

"It's just water, Cas."

"Yes," Cas agreed, in a tone that wasn't really agreement at all.

Dean got that they were apparently having very different subjective experiences here, but still. "Come on, man. Wasn't Hell worse than this?" Purgatory might be harsh and terrifying and relentless, but Dean remembered Hell as so much _worse_.

But Castiel shook his head. "Hell was Heaven's opposite. Purgatory is..." His gaze darted at their surroundings, what Dean saw as mossy trees towering over the rocky stream, the clear, swirling water sparkling as it caught sunlight. Cas's eyes went round and glassy with fear. "...other."

* * *

There's a thumb-sized dent in the Impala's hood just behind her left headlight, where someone hadn't hammered out a bigger dent well enough. When Dean keys the ignition, he has to wait through two heartbreaking, wheezy sputters before the engine turns over. When he gets her onto a straightaway, she pulls to the right.

He has nowhere to go. He drives for hours.

He doesn't really decide to stop at the dusty old roadhouse at the outskirts of town. Like the driving--like the long, thin knife sheathed in the sleeve of his coat and the shorter, thicker, wickedly curved one in his boot--it's habit, old and unconscious.

It's Dean's first time in a bar in a little over a year. He gets through two beers and four fingers of Jim Beam before a sudden need for fresh air drives him back outside; he barely gets through the side door before he's retching up his drinks in sour splashes onto the ground.

He stands there a few beats while he waits for the pounding in his head to fade, for his breath to come back: bent double, knees shaking, one hand flat on the sunsoaked wall of the bar to hold himself up. He isn't used to what walls feel like anymore. Telling himself it's important to remember, he digs his calloused fingertips against the grainy, manmade rasp of bricks until they go numb.

Dean slides back behind the wheel of the Impala with the taste of bile still in his mouth. When he keys the ignition, the car sputters and wheezes.

* * *

They were hunted for almost a week by a pack of rugarus, ten at least, skinny and slavering and so, so hungry for Dean's living, human flesh. When the ambush finally came, it was less an attack than a feeding frenzy: the rugarus sliced themselves to bloody ribbons on Dean's knives and Castiel's sword again and again, driven mindlessly forward by the need to _taste_.

Until Cas's sword--gone rusty and dull weeks ago--broke.

Dean saw it happen in glimpses, caught through the messy blur of teeth and claws between him and Cas: the smoothly brutal stroke of Cas's arm as he rammed his sword deep into a rugaru's chest; his backwards stumble when he tried to pull the sword out and came away overbalanced, holding just the shorn-off hilt; the look on his face, a frozen expression of profound shock.

Dean lost sight of him then: he had to turn to slash at a shrieking rugaru swiping for his arm, had to decapitate the one that took its place when it fell back. When that body fell--it would only stay down for a few seconds, a minute at most; it was Purgatory, they always got back up--there was a bare second's pause, just long enough for Dean to look wildly for Castiel. Just long enough to find him glaring now, fierce and determined, one hand clamped on another rugaru's shoulder; just long enough to watch him slam his other hand, empty and open and palm-out, straight into the rugaru's body. _Into_ its body, just beneath the bony protrusions of the thing's rib cage, hand and wrist and forearm buried almost to the elbow.

And then there was light.

When it faded, the forest was silent and still and strewn with corpses.

Dean blinked afterimages out of his eyes, breathing hard. The silence rang around him, uncanny. The stillness did, too; he stayed crouched for a long, tense moment, waiting for the first movement of reanimation from the fallen rugarus. They didn't get back up.

At the centre of the carnage, Castiel stood motionless, staring distractedly off to the side. "Cas?" Dean tried, hoarse and a bit too harsh. Nothing. " _Cas?_ "

Cas turned and looked at him with a distant kind of focus. He tilted his head. "I absorbed one of them."

"You--"

"I needed power, so I absorbed one of them. They are all souls, Dean," he said mildly, and for an awful, sickening second, Dean was staring again at the Castiel who'd swallowed everything around them and called himself God.

Then Cas blinked; he looked at Dean, and his eyes filled with recognition, followed by horror, followed by shame. The straight line of his shoulders disjointed into uncertainty, and he looked hurriedly away, ducking his head and shuffling his feet on the blood-soaked grass. At his sides, his fingers started plucking at the fabric of his coat. "I don't understand why humans associate the hippopotamus with gluttony," he said in a conversational rush, and Dean shut his eyes and took slow breaths and shook, just a little, because _this_ Castiel was both a relief and sickening in a whole other way. "Certainly, they consume a much greater amount of food than the average human could possibly stomach in a day, but given the sizeable difference in healthy body mass between a hippopotamus and a human--and, consequently, the difference in caloric intake required to adequately sustain one member of each species--well, it seems something of a misapprehension to consider the hippopotamus a true glutton. Don't you agree, Dean?"

Dean dragged his eyes open. Cas's head was still down, his fingers still fidgeting. "Cas," Dean said evenly. Cas's hands stoppped moving. "Are you planning on eating every monster soul we run into?"

He looked up then, his eyes wide and earnest. "Oh, no. That game was very loud, and much too disruptive. Besides," he added, and he held up his sword for Dean to see: his whole, shining sword. "It's mended now."

Castiel didn't seem to see the faint line of new tarnish already starting to dull the gleam of the blade. Dean wondered if he'd even known there was anything wrong with it before it broke.

* * *

The body of some poor club kid who'd decided to cut through the wrong seedy alley on his way home is crumpled on the dirty, rain-slicked pavement. His eyes are frozen open, staring emptily; with nothing to animate it, no charm or attitude to pretend otherwise, his pale, round face puts him at maybe fifteen years old. There's a messy bite in the side of his throat, his skin torn meaty and wet.

Nausea and guilt and futile anger heat through Dean like a fever. "Jesus, Benny."

Benny pushes his hands into his pockets and smiles at Dean, easy and unconcerned. He stands casually over the body with his powerful square stance and powerful round shoulders, the kind of power that had been good to keep close in Purgatory. The kind of power that had helped get them out. His barrel chest is spattered with arterial spray; his smiling mouth is smeared bloody.

He whistles as he wanders away down the alley, leaving Dean to deal with the murder scene.

* * *

"Dean."

Castiel's voice was low and thready and woke Dean up like a shout. Cas sat on his knees beside him, watching him anxiously, his wide eyes shrouded and luminous by flickering turns as the guttering firelight chased shadows around their cave. "Dean," he said again, seeing him awake, and the intent of it seeped through Dean's skin and twined around his spine.

There was a tug at his clothes: Cas was making a slow fist around a handful of Dean's tattered shirt. Dean sat up. "You need--"

"Yes," Cas said, like it was all he could manage, and kissed Dean hard, bearing him back down to the ground.

Dean let his hair be pulled and his shirts rucked up, his jeans unfastened and pulled down his legs with clumsy haste. He parted his lips for Cas's tongue and licked his own into Cas's mouth; parted his thighs for Cas's hips and rocked up as Cas rutted down. It was fast and raw, their cocks sliding together in a heated slick of sweat, but Dean made it good, too, got his hand between them and around Cas to give him more friction, something tighter to fuck. Castiel kept his eyes open the whole time, focused on Dean's eyes or his mouth with a desperate kind of concentration, and it wasn't long before he rasped out, "Dean, Dean, _Dean_ ," and spilled warm and wet all over Dean's hand.

While Cas gasped and trembled and came back down, Dean wrapped his messy hand around himself and stroked--just a few quick, rough pulls, not nearly what he needed, not nearly what made his breath heavy with anticipation. Sometimes when they did this, when Cas finally moved, it was to raise himself up on his knees over Dean's cock and then sink back down, a slow, insistent impalement that made Dean curse at the feel of it, at the sight of his cock pushing into Cas; this time, he retreated down Dean's body, interrupted Dean's hand, and looked steadily up at Dean as he took Dean's dick into his mouth, slid his full, spit-licked lips all the way down the thick, come-slicked length of him. Dean watched, breathless, as Cas hollowed his cheeks around him and pulled back off, curled his tongue around the head before taking him in again. Dean bit out, "Fuck, _Cas_ ," and dark heat flared in his eyes; Dean had to fist his hands in Cas's hair then, had to start snapping his hips up hard and fast, had to fuck deep into Cas's hot, hungry mouth until he came. Cas swallowed it all when he did, sucked and licked and swallowed until Dean couldn't take it anymore and pulled him off. 

But Castiel was still restless, and settled himself warmly atop Dean and kissed him, soft and sloppy and lingering. There was more than just need in it; more than just Cas holding on, for a few more seconds, to the relief of feeling something good in that place for a change. Dean thought it might have been the same unnamed thing he'd spent the better part of a year trying to drink away when he'd thought Cas was dead.

Silently, he curved his hands over Cas's prickly-stubbled jaw and kissed him back.

* * *

The first time they fuck back in the world, Dean spends a long, distracted minute just touching Cas's clothes: the trench coat that's clean again, all the rips and tears of claws and teeth gone as if they'd never been; the suit jacket beneath, last seen when it dissolved into a lake, Jesus, two years ago; the tie, because--"Fuck, Cas, your _clothes_." He clutches whole, thick fabrics in his fists, and it's different, but so is everything anymore. Dean's used to it.

Castiel kisses him, and _that's_ familiar. The beard's gone--no scrape of whiskers on Dean's cheeks, or under his palms when he stops twisting at foreign buttons and silk and holds Cas to him--but the shape of Cas's mouth, the warm push of his tongue, the taste of his skin and his breath and his want, all of that's the same. All of that is right. Dean shudders and mouths at the smooth line of Cas's jaw and murmurs against it, "Cas, I need--"

They're in an old farmhouse, newly empty of people. Long empty of people, actually. Newly-vacated by the family of ghouls who'd eaten the people and stolen their faces and moved in, who'd lived there and preyed on the local mortuary and cemeteries for close to three years. They should've been hunted down sooner; Sam lives just two towns over, for Christ's sake, he should've seen the obituaries and the grave desecrations and hunted the bastards _sooner_. Instead, they'd lived in this house and faked the owners' lives and eaten good people until just a little over an hour ago, when Dean had followed them home and cut off their heads.

It's in a well-furnished house, then, where Dean has Castiel pressed up against the faded wallpaper--there's a couch in the living room just down the hall, and beds upstairs--but Cas is familiar with need: he bends Dean over the sturdy wooden workhorse of a kitchen table instead, one hand flat and firm between Dean's shoulder blades while the other, fingers slick with spit, works him relentlessly open. Dean presses himself down under Cas's warm palm, and spreads his arms across the tabletop so he can grip the edge, and spreads his legs for Cas's hand. When Cas finally replaces the wicked crooking of his fingers with the thick, blunt nudge of his cock, Dean breathes out a thankful litany: "Cas, fuck, _Cas_."

Cas fucks him slowly, a long, steady roll of his hips that strokes his cock deep inside Dean before dragging almost all the way out again. Dean pants and curses and pushes himself back, trying for _harder_ and _faster_ and _more_ , but Cas keeps his pace; keeps one hand resting lightly on the small of Dean's back, too, where Dean's muscles shift and twist with the needy rock of his hips.

"Dean." Cas leans forward and grazes his mouth along the line of Dean's shoulders, chasing the hard edge of his teeth with soft licks of his tongue. It changes his angle inside Dean--strikes sparks up Dean's spine at the end of every thrust--but not his measured rhythm; Dean clenches his fingers on the tabletop so he can bear it, so he doesn't reach down and wrap his own hand around his achingly untouched dick. He wants Cas's hand, Cas's long fingers and broad palm wrapped around him while Cas's cock pushes full and deep inside. "Dean, do you--I thought--here--"

"Cas, don't." Dean knows what he thought. Before Dean left Purgatory, he'd thought the same thing: that this, what they'd had, would stop. That Castiel wouldn't need it once they were out, and Dean wouldn't offer, and it wouldn't happen. That the unnamed thing between them--the thing that made Cas tender with Dean, that wrecked Dean without Cas--would stay unnamed. "Don't--just--" The words catch in his throat.

When Dean says nothing more, Cas straightens up. His right hand stops petting over the smooth torsion of Dean's muscles, and slides over to join his left hand at Dean's waist; his fingers curl over the spurs of Dean's hipbones, and he starts pulling Dean back onto his dick, starts fucking him hard. "Whatever you need, Dean," he says, and it's low and cool and distant, the sound of Cas at total odds with the feel of him behind Dean, inside him, giving him more, making it good.

Dean shakes, different kinds of desperation rolling together like waves under his skin. He needs to touch, but Cas is so far away; uncurling one hand from its painful grip on the table, Dean reaches back until his fingers find the straining flex of Cas's thigh. "Fuck, Cas, no--that's not--"

"Then what--I don't--" Just like that, the distance is gone: Castiel's voice is heated right through, hitching with things he can't figure out how to say. A muscle jumps out of rhythm under the brush of Dean's hand, and Cas's fingertips dig into Dean's skin hard enough to bruise, and Dean realises Cas is shaking, too. "Do you--"

_Do you need,_ Dean had asked in Purgatory, every time; _I need,_ he'd said here too, and it was true, but it meant something different. Everything is different here. "Yeah," he says now, raw. "Yeah, Cas, I want--fuck. I _want_ you, too."

Castiel makes a starved noise. His rhythm falls to pieces as bends himself over Dean again, covers Dean's feverish body with the weight of his own; he fucks Dean _hard_ , his hips snapping forward fast and frantic. "Dean--"

"Yeah, Cas, fuck--Cas, _please_ \--"

At the first touch of Cas's hand to Dean's dick, Dean chokes out a shout; before Cas has even closed the circle of his fingers around him, Dean comes, his hips jerking raggedly with each long, thick pulse. He feels Cas stutter against him; a moment later, feels him come inside him, the warm, wet spill of it slicking the last rough shoves of his cock as he fucks Dean full.

Dean pulls Cas to him afterward, pulls him close and kisses him, soft and lingering. There's more than just need in it; more than just need in the silent way Cas kisses him back. Dean holds onto the relief of it, the familiarity of that unnamed something more in this place where everything is different, everything is wrong.

Everything but this.


End file.
